July 2007 archive

Free Software Money Management Quandary

Update, 10 January 2008: See "related" below for the latest on this topic.

I found myself facing a moral quandary yesterday. I considered using proprietary software for a job that has lots of free software alternatives. You see, I have these doubts and reservations about the free options.
The gravitational pull of 12 years worth [...]

One Year of 'Moving to Freedom'

On 19 July 2006, I posted my first real entry on this blog, introducing 'Moving to Freedom' BETA. (Previous to that there were a few fake test posts, now deleted, some of which still seem to be echoing around in Google, judging by complaints of missing pages I sometimes see in Webmaster Tools.)
I had [...]

Summer Days, One Step at a Time

Thursday marked one year of "Moving to Freedom." But this isn't the post for that; I'm planning another entry with graphs and stats and suitably pompous observations. I bring it up as a way of explaining my posting lately. I don't feel the need to apologize, but I realize I'm not posting [...]

Lake Superior Rocky and Pebbly Shoreline

Penguin Pete wrote a nice tutorial on how to make 3D pebbles in the GIMP. I haven't tried the howto yet but trust that it will explain things very well.
He wrote "Grab an example image of pebbles or rocks from online/creative-commons works. Since we're only going to be sampling them for a few pixels, [...]

Lines are Blurring

I still work on a Windows laptop for my day job (but thankfully also on a Red Hat Linux server), and I'm using VNC to remotely run Microsoft Money and a couple of Excel spreadsheets on a laptop at home, but other than that I've been all in Ubuntu at home (well, a little bit [...]

Not Unexpectedly: K3b is Just Swell for CD and DVD Burning in GNU/Linux

When I wrote about using Brasero for CD burning in GNOME a few months ago, I realized that the KDE app K3b was out there and probably pretty good, but Brasero was fine for what I was doing at the time so I didn't look any further.
I also figured I'd want to try K3b soon [...]

Mostly Done!

Not particularly impressive, but here are the Amur Maples in their new bed. Of course now I wish we had planted them five or seven years ago so they'd be a good screen by now between us and the neighbors. (Not that we don't like our neighbors; it's just that we're all jammed [...]

Doing Things the Hard Way

I'm on vacation this week and it seemed like it would be fun to remove some of the grass from our yard. I've rented a manual sod "kicker" to cut sod in the past, but was seriously questioning my decision this time around. It's hard work, and I'm older and fatter now. [...]